An increasing number of individuals are engaging in meditation and achieving spiritual experiences. However, what exactly do individuals experience in meditative states? What are the characteristics of such states? Does it make sense to discuss different levels of mental states, like Buddhists who talks about deep meditation states called "jhānas"? And how does this relate to spiritual experiences and so called enlightenment?

Solid, academic knowledge on meditation is sparse. The methodological difficulties are evident: one only has direct experience with their own psyche, thus rendering it purely subjective, which is taboo within science. And of course, enlightenment and spirituality is religious terms not worthy of interest for the scientific community. Or...?

Rupert Sheldrake has practiced meditation throughout his adult life and has extensively written about this and other spiritual practices. Terje Sparby is one of the few academics researching meditation, utilizing his own (first-person) experiences with meditation and combining them with second-hand descriptions. Sparby is convinced that there are similarities between states across religious and spiritual traditions.

Welcome to a conversation that will be of great interest to all who are engaged in or wish to begin meditation.

Introduction by Rupert Sheldrake.

Terje Sparby is a philosopher and meditation researcher with a specialty in German idealist philosophy, consciousness, and phenomenological/first-person research methods. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg and has been a postdoc at Humboldt University in Berlin and the Bender Institute of Neuroimaging at the University of Giessen, as well as a visiting researcher at the Mind and Life Institute in the USA. Today, he works as a professor and research leader at Steiner University College in Oslo.

Rupert Sheldrake is a British biologist and author of over a hundred academic articles and nine books, including "A New Science of Life," (1981) and "The Science Delusion" (2012), "Science and Spiritual Practices" (2017), the last two translted into Norwegian. He studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge and the history and philosophy of science at Harvard University. He discusses psychedelic substances in a chapter of the book "Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work" (2019).